'Rent It Out': Portlandia Spoofs The Sharing Economy

In one episode of Portlandia, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen started a grass-roots campaign to prevent the Olympics from ever coming to Portland.

IFC

Originally published on February 27, 2014 3:16 pm

There isn't much hipster culture that doesn't get lampooned by the IFC program Portlandia. (Public radio's not immune.) And one of the big cultural shifts of the moment is the move away from ownership and toward access. Younger generations say they care less about owning a home, for instance, or even a car. Why bother, when you can couch surf and car share, bike share and more? It's powering the sharing economy, an economy of bartering and entrepreneurship, where people offer their own excess goods and services.

Your tech reporting team has been covering the sharing economy frontier, here on the blog and on-air, with a December theme week devoted to the topic. So you can imagine our delight when the idea of renting everything — for a profit — got its sendup in a new clip for Portlandia's season 4 premiere. The show's star, Fred Armisen, showed off the "Rent It Out!" sketch during a guest appearance on The Tonight Show: